[dasvadanya]

>"Rather than micro-optimize protocols to protect race conditions in procedural code, modern distributed systems creativity often involves minimizing the use of such protocols."

Commerical databases 20 years ago had "shared nothing" designs precisely to avoid locks. The term "embarrassingly parallel" was introduced in the 1980s! The technique of multi-version concurrency control is widely used in databases and was first introduced in the 1980s. Maybe the authors forgot.